Chapter 6
Chapter
Six
Vaxon
Pain was a distant concept, filtered through layers of shock and failing consciousness.
I watched Elena drag my body behind a twisted support beam, her small frame somehow moving my eight-foot-eight bulk through sheer determination and adrenaline.
Blood, my blood, slicked the derelict's floor, leaving a trail that would make us easy to track.
The raiders would follow. They always did.
"Stay down." Elena's voice cut through the fog in my head. She'd positioned herself between me and the corridor, salvaged raider weapon in her hands, hazel eyes burning with something feral and fierce. "I'm not losing you."
I tried to speak. Tried to tell her to finish the engine repairs, to save herself, to follow basic survival protocol that said one life didn't matter when hundreds hung in the balance.
But my mouth wouldn't form words. The plasma burns across my torso had done more damage than I'd initially assessed, nerve damage, probably.
Muscle tissue compromised. Internal bleeding.
I was dying.
The thought should have terrified me. Instead, I felt only regret—not for myself, but for her. For the fact that I'd finally admitted what I felt, finally kissed her in that moment of desperate honesty on the derelict, only to die before we could explore what existed between us.
"Vaxon." She glanced back at me, and I saw fear crack through her fierce expression. "Don't you dare close your eyes. Stay with me."
I wanted to obey. Wanted to stay conscious, to protect her the way every instinct screamed I should. But darkness pulled at the edges of my vision, promising relief from the pain that was starting to break through my shock.
Footsteps echoed in the corridor. Multiple hostiles, moving with tactical precision. They'd tracked us faster than expected.
Elena raised the weapon, and I realized with distant shock that her hands weren't shaking. My scattered engineer, my chaotic electrical specialist who could barely sit still during mission briefings, held that raider rifle with the steady competence of someone who'd done this before.
"Grew up in a rough neighborhood," she'd said earlier, like it explained everything. Like that casual admission encompassed whatever history had taught her to shoot with deadly accuracy.
The first raider rounded the corner.
Elena didn't hesitate. One shot, center mass, dropping him before he could raise his own weapon. The second hostile learned from his companion's mistake—came in low and fast, using debris for cover.
She adjusted her aim with fluid precision, waited for him to expose himself, fired. The shot clipped his shoulder, sending him stumbling back. Not a kill, but enough to make him retreat.
"How many more?" she called out in trade language, voice sharp and commanding.
Silence from the corridor. Then movement, they were regrouping, reassessing. They'd expected easy targets. Instead they'd found a woman who fought like a cornered predator.
I tried to focus on her datapad, and saw her fingers flying across the interface with her free hand. Somehow she was working on the engine repairs while simultaneously holding off hostiles. Multitasking at a level that should have been impossible.
She was magnificent.
"Engine power routing through secondary conduits," she muttered, more to herself than me. "Come on, come on—"
More footsteps. They were coming from two directions now, trying to flank us. Elena's eyes tracked both corridors, calculating angles and odds with the same brilliant mind that rewired power grids.
"Three more hostiles approaching," I managed to rasp. My tactical implants were still feeding me data even if my body was failing. "Thirty seconds."
"Then I better work fast." Her fingers moved even faster across the datapad. "Just need to override the safety lockouts, reroute power through, yes!"
The shuttle's engines roared to life somewhere above us, the vibration rattling through the derelict's damaged structure. But we were still trapped down here, still pinned by hostiles who wouldn't let us reach the shuttle even if I could move.
"Can you stand?" Elena asked.
"No."
"Can you shoot?"
I looked at my hands. They were shaking, barely responsive. "No."
"Then hold on to me and try not to die. I'm getting us out of here."
She holstered her weapon, grabbed my arm, and hauled with strength that shouldn't have existed in her compact frame. My vision whited out from the pain as she dragged me upright, positioned herself under my shoulder to take my weight.
I was twice her height and probably four times her mass. This wouldn't work. Couldn't work.
But Elena Vasquez had apparently decided that physics was negotiable.
"Move." She half-carried, half-dragged me toward the corridor junction, away from the approaching hostiles. Each step sent fresh agony through my damaged torso, but I forced my legs to cooperate, tried to take some of my own weight.
Behind us, the raiders emerged into our previous position. Saw us moving. Opened fire.
Elena ducked into an intersecting corridor, plasma bolts scorching the air where we'd been seconds before. The shuttle was two levels up and fifty meters forward, might as well have been on a different planet given my current condition.
"Shuttle, this is Vasquez." She activated her comm, breathless but steady. "We need emergency extraction, lower cargo bay, now."
Er'dox's voice crackled back: "We can't dock there, structural integrity is compromised."
"I don't care if it's compromised. Hover close enough for us to jump. Vaxon's critically injured and we've got hostiles converging on our position."
Silence. Then: "Understood. Moving into position. Thirty seconds."
Thirty seconds. An eternity when raiders were hunting us through a dying ship.
Elena pulled me forward, each step a negotiation with consciousness. I could feel my body shutting down, blood loss and trauma overwhelming even Zandovian resilience. My vision tunneled, sounds growing distant and muffled.
"Stay with me, Commander." Elena's voice cut through the fog. "That's an order."
I almost smiled. She was giving me orders now. My chaotic, brilliant engineer who'd never met a regulation she couldn't creatively reinterpret.
The raiders were close. I could hear them coordinating, closing the net. We'd never make it to the cargo bay. The math was simple and brutal.
"Leave me," I managed to say. "Get to the shuttle."
"Shut up."
"Elena—"
"I said shut up." She dragged me around another corner, and I saw the cargo bay ahead, massive doors blown open to space, the shuttle hovering beyond them like a promise of salvation. "We're both getting out of here, or neither of us is. Those are the only options."
The raiders burst into the corridor behind us.
Elena didn't slow down. Didn't look back. Just pulled me forward with desperate strength, closing the distance to those open cargo doors where vacuum and death waited.
The shuttle maneuvered closer, Er'dox's piloting threading the needle between debris and structural collapse. Ten meters. Five.
Plasma fire scorched past us. One bolt caught Elena's shoulder and she stumbled, gasped in pain but didn't stop moving. Blood bloomed across her sleeve—a wound that would have dropped a smaller woman.
But Elena Vasquez had apparently decided that pain was also negotiable.
We reached the cargo bay's edge. The shuttle hovered just beyond, ramp extended but still three meters away. Too far to jump, especially with my weight.
"This is going to be ugly," Elena said.
Then she jumped, pulling me with her.
For a moment we were suspended in space, the derelict's artificial gravity giving way to void. I felt weightless, disconnected from my failing body. Saw stars beyond the shuttle, infinite and cold.
We slammed into the shuttle's ramp, Elena taking the impact with a grunt that suggested broken ribs. But her hands locked onto the ramp's safety rails, and somehow, impossibly, she held us both as the shuttle's gravity caught us and pulled us inward.
The ramp retracted. Doors sealed. Atmosphere returned in a rush that made my damaged lungs scream.
"Got them!" Er'dox's voice, triumphant and relieved. "Disengaging now."
The shuttle pulled away from the derelict as Elena collapsed beside me, both of us bleeding on the cargo bay floor. Behind us, through the closing ramp, I saw the raiders reach the cargo bay edge. Saw them raise their weapons.
Then the derelict exploded.
The shockwave caught the shuttle, sent us tumbling through space before Er'dox's piloting stabilized us.
Through the viewport I watched debris scatter, watched fire bloom and die in the vacuum.
The raiders, their ship, any evidence of what had been hidden in that derelict, all of it consumed by destruction.
Elena had done it. She'd completed her mission and saved my life, refusing to sacrifice either objective.
"Don't you dare die on me," she whispered, her hand finding mine. Blood stained both our fingers. "Not after all that."
I managed to squeeze her hand, put every ounce of remaining strength into that single gesture. "Wouldn't dream of it."
Then consciousness finally gave up its fight, and darkness claimed me.
I woke to white light and the distinctive smell of Mothership's medical bay, antiseptic with undertones of the exotic compounds Zorn used for xenobiological treatment. My body felt wrong, disconnected, like someone had taken it apart and reassembled the pieces slightly off.
But I was alive.
Memory returned in fragments. The derelict. The raiders. Elena dragging my dying body to safety. That impossible jump across the void.
"He's waking." Bea's voice, clinically professional. "Vitals are stabilizing. Neural response improving."